SHAMROCK (and Zombie Post Script)

This was the other NSA program, apart from MINARET, that was investigated and revealed in the Church/Tower Senate hearings. It started during WWII and continued until 1975, not shut down until the Senate uncovered it. These two programs are what lead to FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that required warrants for NSA to do what it had been doing with the help of RCA, ITT, and Western Union. In those days, the record says, these companies were not even compensated for turning over records of telegraphs of TIs.

The partisanship was light during those hearings. There are some exceptions:

I say again, the public’s right to know must be responsibly weighed against the impact of release on the public’s right to be secure.

– Sen. John G. Tower

How did SHAMROCK, MINARET, for that matter MK/ULTRA and the related programs make us more secure?

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither … He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security.

– Benjamin Franklin

Then, after 9-11 George W. Bush reinterpreted FISA, or more accurately reinterpreted the law in general, saying that the President had the right to do absolutely anything to protect the country. In other words, the rule of law was suspended and remains so today.

Now, of course, it’s big business with Google, AT&T among many others involved and being paid to do so. And they cannot be sued. Nor apparently can the federal government. In essence, if someone doesn’t like you, you are f***ed without recourse unless you can afford to buy your politicians back.

I think it could be argued that the building of the NSA facility in Utah is itself illegal for the purposes it is being built for. Yet no such debate has taken place in a public forum. It’s just being done. Period.

Refuting the coward’s maxim: “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about” is possibly the main point of this blog. You definitely do. These people can take everything away from you in the blink of an eye and it won’t matter where you turn, there is no stopping it. They will, after having done so, remind you constantly that they did so and that you have no recourse. Congress is not doing its job and it is not the Executive’s job to limit its power. Inspectors General are also employees of the executive and, much like the complaints of Senators Tower and Goldwater about even publicly discussing SHAMROCK, the use of technology and advanced bio discoveries puts them in a position of revealing how things are done along with what was done. Undoubtedly, the fascists (really, can there be any other adequate label? This is directly counter to democracy) know and exploit this to good effect.

So they try to present you with two violent options: do harm to someone else (misplaced aggression) or to yourself (eliminating a critic and a witness). The first, obviously, would allow them to post-justify their draconian acts in the first place. The second, obviously removes a witness, allowing them to continue to terrorize other Americans, to burn down homes without seeing any negative repercussions for their acts, to commit acts of assassination not just via drones overseas, but here on this soil with voice-to-skull and other tech and black ops.

It is obvious to me that there will eventually be fallout from these programs. It is also obvious that whatever steps are taken as a result of that will largely be too little and to some degree too late.

[…] Helping him in this treasonous venture, Senator John G. Tower. The same Senator John G. Tower who tried to protect NSA’s illegal activities between 1945 and 1975 and whom I quoted here along with Franklin. […]